JVH comments on Parking News every day at PT Blog – log on at www.parkingtoday.com. Each month, there are at least 40 other comments like these, posted daily.

If you go to the online edition of December 2010

ParkingToday, you will find all the “hot links” below. And evenmore current comments by PT Editor JVH.

Yankee StadiumParking Strikes Out (Posted Oct. 29) There is some irony here. Or maybe it’s a point of view. The

cover article of the November issue of IPI’s The Parking Profes- sional magazine is about the parking at Yankee Stadium. As you read through the article, you find that the 4,000 spaces divided between two modern well-designed garages can make a great difference to fans and local residents in the Bronx, NY. However, if you read an Oct. 29 article in the NY Daily

News, you find another side of the story. It seems the project is so far in the red that most likely it will default. Yankee fans are staying away in droves. The garages are running at 60% capac- ity during home games and are basically empty (one is closed) the rest of the year. Money quote: “The truth of the matter is, the whole thing’s

a mess,” said one financial adviser to several bondholders. “If the city doesn’t step in, there’s no way Bronx Parking (Develop- ment, the organization that built and runs the garages) can pay back the money it took to build those garages.”

Bronx Parking has already failed to pay more than $10 mil-

lion in back rent and interest to the city for the garage system, which sits on city-owned land. The bondholders have asked for more time to review the company’s plans to avoid a total col- lapse. But anyone who looks at the numbers will realize that this could be one of the most embarrassing defaults of a tax-exempt bond in decades for NewYork City. My spies on the scene say that anyone with a minor knowl-

edge of parking could have told them that their business model was doomed to failure. I did the numbers, and if the garages were completely full for every home game (80), the money gen- erated would not pay the interest on the mortgage. Operating costs and the rest simply weren’t in the cards. When the operating company realized what was happening,

it raised the price of parking and simply drove more people to the subway or nearby garages (less than two blocks) that charge less than half the charge atYankee Stadium. The headline in The Parking Professional is “NewYankee

Stadium Parking Is Home Run for Bronx.”Maybe the design and the rest are pretty and well thought out, but the money side is more like a popup to the infield. The garages aren’t providing “much needed” parking to the area, since existing garages aren’t being used nearly to capacity Continued on Page 40